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There’s a LiveJournal community based in the Russian Federation devoted to Yukio Mishima. I flipped through the posts and they had some Mishima-related content I’d never seen before.
Мисима Юкио
ru_mishima at LiveJournal – http://community.livejournal.com/ru_mishima/
An American fellow was inspired by Yukio Mishima to study Japanese swordsmanship. He just started a blog titled “American Mishima.”
I recently wrote a piece for The Spearhead, an online anti-feminist men’s magazine, incorporating Yukio Mishima’s story. In part, I did this to honor the 39th anniversary of Mishima’s hara-kiri last week.
“Here come the herbivores”
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2009/11/22/here-come-the-herbivores/
Tags: hara kiri, herbivores, the spearhead
I happened across this excellent essay on revisiting and re-evaluating Mishima’s work.
Tags: Haruki Murakami, Jay McInerney, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
http://www.lohud.com/article/20090929/CALENDAR/90925008/-1/SPORTS/Meet-the-director
September 29, 2009
Director Paul Schrader returns to the Jacob Burns Film Center with “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters,” an ambitious exploration of Japan’s great postwar author Yukio Mishima. He was also a flamboyant actor and body-builder, who took over Japan’s army headquarters in 1970 and publicly committed suicide. Propelled by an ethereal Philip Glass score, the film won an award at Cannes and received stunning reviews but flew mostly under the radar when released. Screening begins at 7:15 p.m. followed by a Q&A with Paul Schrader, who is also a celebrated screenwriters (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull). Tickets are $13. 364 Manville Rd., Pleasantville. 914-747-5555.
Tags: paul schrader
Photography show featuring one of Eikoh Hosoe’s famous images of Mishima.
The Provoke Era: Postwar Japanese Photography: Sandra Phillips and W.S. di Piero in Conversation
Tags: eikoh hosoe
Came across this article from the Japan Times, written by Hiroaki Sato, who is working on a biography of Mishima.
Apparently, Japan’s new Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama is getting criticism for saying things about Japan’s military being in the pocket of the US. This concerned another Yukio many years ago…
“…after all these years, there persists the nagging suspicion, articulated most clearly toward the end of the 1960s by Yukio Mishima, that the ultimate commander of the Japanese military, the SDF, is not the Japanese prime minister but the U.S. president.
Not just the Persian Gulf War in 1991 but also the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 has demonstrated the validity of this suspicion.
It was at least this murky status of the SDF that Mishima, originally a law student, wanted to clear away. He proposed to split the forces into two separate entities: one a Japanese contingent for “U.N. peacekeeping operations,” and the other an entity dedicated to homeland defense. Hatoyama’s outline for constitutional revision on his homepage comes remarkably close to Mishima’s idea four decades ago, though without the part about splitting the forces.”
Tags: Hiroaki Sato, SDF, Yukio Hatoyama
Post about graphic design, a cover for an edition of Forbidden Colors and Tadanori Yokoo, poster artist who also did this poster of Yukio Mishima.
More on Tadanori Yokoo here.
h/t Troy Chambers
An interesting article from Japan Echo , specfically dealing with Mishima’s “Eirei no koe.”
Mishima insisted that nucleus of the integrated, organic culture that embraced the chrysanthemum and the sword was none other than “the emperor as culture.” He explains the concept as follows, using the archaic term miyabi (courtly elegance).
Miyabi was the cultural essence of the imperial court and the people’s longing for it, but during troubled times, miyabi could even take the form of terrorism. That is to say, the emperor as a cultural concept held out his hand not only to the forces of state power and order but also to the forces of chaos.
Tags: Crysanthemum and the Sword, Eirei no koe, emperor, Japan Echo, Miyabi, Ruth Benedict, Voices of the Heroic Dead
A smug, pro-post-modernist article that mentions Mishima dismissively (almost in a bitchy way, actually), yet more or less summarizes the fears Mishima expressed about the “spirit” (or psychology) of a castrated Japan a few decades ago. He warned that Japan would become known for “the chrysanthemum” or Ikebana and, well, other “cute” stuff.
The author should know that American young people have also accepted that “there are no absolute answers to anything.”
It’s called relativism. They teach it in universities and on MTV. It could also be called overactive empathy, emotionalism, indecisiveness and fear of taking a stand. If you don’t bother with drawing lines, you can busy yourself with buying Manga and playing video games and chatting on Facebook while Rome burns.
Tags: adbusters, chrysanthemum, Kenzaburo Oe, Ryu Murakami, Takashi Murakami, yukio mishima
